Cinema: I Even Met Happy Gypsies

A man bleeds to death in a mound of white goose feathers. A truncated boy hobbles on leg stumps, begging a living from passersby. A Carmenesque singer wails her miseries in a dingy nightclub. An adolescent takes a 16-year-old wife and finds himself unable to consummate the marriage, while a crowd of townspeople gathers below the couple's window, hooting.

In all of Happy Gypsies, there is not a single happy gypsy—the title is an ironic quote from a traditional tzigane tune. The actors who play the gypsies may be elated now, however, for this Yugoslav movie has been nominated for an Academy Award. With good reason. Though it is full of flaws and inconsistencies of style, it depicts with melancholy and muted color the odd, anachronistic ways of an all-but-forgotten people.

On the Pannonian plain near Belgrade, a colony of gypsies dwells in a clot of squalor, surviving on what they earn from buying and selling goose feathers. Outstanding among them is an erotic, intemperate feather merchant named Bora, played by Bekim Fehmiu, a Yugoslav actor strongly reminiscent of Jean-Paul Belmondo. Endlessly indulging in wife-beating and mistress-bedding, Bora downs liters of wine and scatters his seed, his feathers and his future. As the film's principal character, he meanders from confined hovels to expansive farm fields, from rural barrooms to the streets of Belgrade. Wherever he travels, he witnesses—and sometimes acts out—the gypsies' heritage of violence and tragedy. In the process, he provides the viewer with astonishing glimpses of a rapidly vanishing life. Like the film, Bora lacks central coherence, but his days are not without a primitive beauty—the wide, unspoiled farm fields, the medieval pageantry of the Serbian Orthodox Church services, the umber, smoldering faces of the gypsy women.

Though he has a reality that belongs to him alone, Bora is manifestly meant to be a symbol as well. In his final contribution to the film's bleak catalogue of miseries, he stabs his rival and flees the town. As he disappears, he be comes all gypsies—the Indians of rope who can neither escape nor brace the present and whose future is foreshadowed with doom.